Israel's official election result, published after every ballot was counted, gives Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing bloc the largest share of seats but leaves it without a majority in the 120-member parliament, Nettavisen reports. The coalition of right-wing and far-right parties won 53 seats, short of the 61 needed to control the chamber. The opposition bloc led by centrist politician Gadi Eisenkot took 48.
Why it matters
The arithmetic points to weeks of difficult coalition talks and no obvious path to a stable government. If the negotiations fail, Israel could be forced back to the polls. The outcome also places the country's Arab parties at the center of the process for the first time at this scale.
Turnout was unusually high. According to Times of Israel, cited by Nettavisen, 77.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, the highest figure in decades.
Arab parties hold the balance
Raam and the Joint List, the two Arab parties, together won 19 seats — their largest showing ever, according to the reported results. That total makes them potentially decisive in the talks that follow.
The Joint List, an alliance of Arab parties, has said it will do everything in its power to remove Netanyahu from office. That has fed expectations that it might back Eisenkot's attempt to assemble an anti-Netanyahu coalition, though it remains unclear whether Joint List politicians would be welcome inside such a government.
Netanyahu responded to the result with a claim of theft rather than a concession. In a post on X, he wrote that the election in the state of Israel had been stolen by Arab parties that support terror and the elimination of the Jewish state. He also alleged interference by foreign powers that he said had helped the Arab parties, and asserted without documentation that Arab-Israeli parties had received foreign funding to influence the vote. Both Arab parties and Qatar have flatly denied this.
The dispute centers on allegations that Raam received money from Qatar to buy votes. The Gulf state, which is wealthy in oil, has ties to Hamas. Raam leader Mansour Abbas denies any wrongdoing and has said he welcomes an investigation. The Joint List, for its part, accuses Netanyahu and his allies of waging an incitement campaign out of fear of growing political influence for Arab voters.
Eisenkot said he had been briefed by Israel's domestic security service, Shin Bet, and by the election commission. According to Nettavisen, he cautioned that it was too early to understand what happened, or whether anything happened at all. He added that it was already clear that Likud and Netanyahu had launched a coordinated and organized campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the election result.
Netanyahu, who is 77, is Israel's longest-serving prime minister, with terms from 1996 to 1999, from 2009 to 2021, and from 2022 to 2026. He had clearly expected another term in office. He has also faced allegations connected to Qatar for some time: last year two of his staff members were arrested on suspicion of receiving payments from the Gulf state. For years he quietly supported Qatar's financing of Hamas in Gaza in the hope of preserving stability, a policy that collapsed with the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
The election commission has separately ordered investigations into alleged foreign influence on the vote, Nettavisen reports.
What to watch now is whether Eisenkot can convert 48 seats plus Arab support into a working majority, and whether the vote-buying allegations produce findings that change the terms of the talks.